President Donald Trump is a “demagogue,” a “con man,” a “grifter” and a “McCarthyite,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Carl Bernsteintold a Chicago audience this week.

But tell us what you really think, Carl.

“He sees himself as a strong man, or wants to see himself as a strong man,” Bernstein — who broke the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post with Bob Woodward — told the crowd at Northeastern Illinois University on Thursday night.

“The consistency of his life is self-promotion at the expense of others as well as this incredible desire for fame and recognition.”

Woodward wasn’t much kinder, describing as “Shakespearean” an encounter he had with Trump in which Trump rejected former President Barack Obama’s praise of American humility and restraint in the exercise of power and told Woodward, “Real power comes from fear.”

“In a sense, that’s the Trump ‘Rosebud,’ ” Woodward added, alluding to a plot element in the film “Citizen Kane.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But Bernstein, 73, and Woodward, 74, sparred agreeably onstage like an old married couple. When Bernstein’s exuberant arm gestures left his handheld microphone out of range, Woodward scolded him, “Hold the microphone steady!”

And when Bernstein admitted to recently rereading sections of “All The President’s Men,” their best-selling book about Watergate, Woodward told him, “This is like Gloria Swanson,” referring to the role Swanson played in “Sunset Boulevard” of an embittered old Hollywood star who dreams of a return to her glory years.

AP

Reporters Carl Bernstein, left, and Bob Woodward in the newsroom of The Washington Post on May 7, 1973.

Reporters Carl Bernstein, left, and Bob Woodward in the newsroom of The Washington Post on May 7, 1973. (AP)

Alas, Woodward’s attempts to be nice to the late, great proprietor of the Post, Katharine Graham (memorably portrayed by Meryl Streep this year in the Oscar-nominated “The Post”), resulted in an insult to the august organ you are currently reading.

When Graham quizzed him about the Chicago Tribune’s reporting of Watergate, Woodward, who shared a $70,000 speaking fee with Bernstein on Thursday said he asked himself, “What the hell’s she doing reading the Chicago Tribune? Nobody in Chicago does!”

Chicago Inc. is proud to report that the audience booed that comment.

Asked afterward by Inc. what his beef with the Tribune was, and whether he had, perhaps — before he helped bring down a corrupt president, won a Pulitzer and was flatteringly portrayed by a young Robert Redford in a hit movie — been overlooked for an internship here as a young lad growing up in Wheaton, Woodward scowled.

“You used to have that thing, ‘The World’s Greatest Newspaper,’ and I wasn’t wild about that,” he said of the slogan that appeared regularly on Page 1 of the newspaper through the 1900s.